How to Build a Fearless Culture

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By CORINNE ARMOUR

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What is a Fearless Culture? When people come together; conversations are focused, lively and creative. The things that matter are surfaced and resolved. This environment promotes positive risk taking that comes from safety to try things and fail.

People feel empowered in their roles and confident to speak out. This lifts the performance bar, promotes curiosity and leads to individual and team development and accountability. Fearless Cultures get results.

The challenges for leaders

1) Being a leader can feel like hard work

The responsibility of having to ‘know’
everything keeps us stuck in the day to day and prevents us from being strategic.
It’s tough to run engaging meetings, and we put off crucial performance
conversations.

2) Staff engagement is patchy

Maybe your organisation is growing rapidly
and is experiencing risk and growing pains. Or maybe your organisation isn’t growing,
and the legacy of history is slowing things down; staff engagement is low, and
people are stuck and lacking in purpose. Problems may be simmering, and it’s
hard to identify the real issues. When challenges arise, you’re fighting fires
rather than building culture.

3) Leadership bench-strength is lacking

A key responsibility of leadership is
developing others. While we might have the right intentions, we get busy and
development conversations don’t happen. Regular feedback discussions don’t seem
to have much impact.

4) The results are questionable

Performance across the organisation is
inconsistent with some divisions not delivering on expectations, and there is a
lack of accountability. Perhaps KPIs are being achieved, but you are concerned
about the approaches being taken.

5) You see that more is possible

The
organisation is performing well; there is a healthy culture and targets being met—yet
you believe more is possible.

Leaders who ask are brave enough and skilled enough to connect deeply, lead fearlessly and achieve transformational results. Leaders who ask, create Fearless Cultures by telling less and asking more.

Building a Fearless Culture

A Fearless Culture is
the result of a cumulative focus of leaders across the organisation, led and
modelled by those at the top. Drawing on questioning techniques and a coaching
approach, leaders who ask, build Fearless
Cultures.

Ask more questions

Leaders who ask leverage what they know about brain science by asking questions to
build engagement and accountability. The ‘generation effect’—replicated in several
behavioural and neuroscience studies—shows that people are more likely to
remember an idea they generate themselves. #

When you ‘tell’ people the answers, the rational brain may be listening, but this won’t help with recall or ownership.

Conversely, when you ‘ask’ questions that lead people to a new understanding, ‘insight’ is involved. Insight is that light bulb moment where the brain pulls seemingly unrelated ideas together and connects them in new ways.

Insights are valuable; they engage the brain’s reward system and trigger a release of dopamine: a neurotransmitter known as a ‘happy chemical’. The simple act of searching for and finding our own answers is rewarding to the brain.

Insight also activates the hippocampus: the area of the brain responsible for long-term memories. Our memory is augmented by insight—we construct rich neural connections to things we already know and can then apply the solution more broadly in the future. So, one insight can address multiple challenges.

If you notice that your
people repeatedly bring the same problems, or that your previous solutions
aren’t being implemented, it might be time for you to tell less and ask more.

Get clear on purpose

In a Fearless Culture,
leaders understand the broad vision. They are clear on individual, team and
organisational purpose.

The leader who asks has a clear purpose for every conversation and facilitates discussion in that direction. Having purpose gives form and leads to an outcome, whether it be a casual chat in the lift, a semi-formal fortnightly catch-up with a direct report, or a team meeting.

Broad types of purpose in conversation might include building awareness, developing new behaviours, extending skills, correcting poor performance, challenging norms, problem solving, generating new ideas, leading a team meeting or connecting a group around a common cause.

Regardless of the location
and occasion, we need to know why we are having a conversation. Questions are
the best way to clarify the purpose, keeping in mind that shared ownership of,
and commitment to, the conversational purpose is more likely to achieve
outcomes.

Show courage

A coaching approach
isn’t for the faint hearted—the leader
who asks needs courage.

It takes courage to
consider your own stuff, put it aside and focus on another person. It takes
courage not to have the answers and ask the questions anyway. It takes courage
to ask rather than tell and to abdicate from the role of ‘leader with all the answers.

Perhaps we need the
most courage when we challenge peers and senior leaders. Consider the
situations uncovered by the Finance Sector Royal Commission. I believe there
were some senior leaders who were not comfortable with things that were
happening but where were the dissenting voices? Did people speak up? Were they
heard? These were not Fearless Cultures.

Courage is not the
absence of fear. In fact, the only time you will ever feel a complete lack of
fear is when you are dead or dead drunk. Neither are useful states for
leadership. Courage is pushing through despite the fear, using the fear as data,
fearing less.

Over to you

Governance leaders
have the dual role of leading and building a Fearless Culture in their own
teams as well as influencing the organisation.

Culture is the sum of everything
we do, each day, and the leader who asks
creates culture- change momentum through telling less and asking more, being
clear on purpose, and showing courage.

What steps can you take today to move towards a Fearless Culture?

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Corinne Armour is a leadership expert who helps leaders and organisations develop Fearless Leadership and deliver transformational results. She is the author of Leaders Who Ask: Building Fearless Cultures by telling less and asking more. She is co-author of Developing Direct Reports: Taking the Guesswork Out of Leading Leaders and two specialist texts on human behaviour.